Heroes
by Blythe Flynn
Summary: You never think the person fading into the faces will ever come back to haunt you...but they do.


Heroes 

Author's Note: This piece is a songfic, as you already know based on the song 'Hero' by Superchic[k]…please be kind, but honest in your reviews…and don't forget to actually review! :o)

Disclaimer: I do not own the song 'Hero' by Superchic[k] so please drag the crawling lawyers away from me…

_'No one sits with him, _

_He doesn't fit in,'_

Gavin pulled his flattened cheese, tomato and ham sandwich out of his crinkled brown paper bag and sat at 'his' table in the cafeteria. All the rest of us high school students were already seated at jammed full tables. The only people left on the outside were Courtney, the blind teacher's assistant and Samuel, the boy with Down's syndrome. I looked over the heads of my cheerleader friends and saw Gavin sucking chocolate milk out of a carton he brought from home. Who brings food from home anyways? Gavin stood up and left the cafeteria early, to head to the library, just like he did everyday. He was always seen with a stack of thick, hardcover books in his arms, rather than buddies fooling around with him, except for when my boyfriend, Jon, and his friends taped a roll of toilet paper onto Gavin's backpack for a laugh, otherwise Gavin pretty much kept to himself.

_'But we feel like we do, _

_And we make fun of him,'_

I never really hated Gavin, he was just always _there _and _around _but he rarely said much of anything to anyone. It was like he was afraid that if he opened his mouth the rest of his body might crawl in there and he'd swallow himself whole in one big gulp. When Gavin did talk to me it was mostly about really random things. He would say things to me like "Jenny, did you know that women have nine times the pain threshold that men do? That must mean that women can really handle pain, but I was thinking, what pain? Women don't play football, or get kicked in the balls or anything, what pain do girls have, huh, Jenny?" I didn't have the nerve or the heart to remind him of 'female problems' or anything of the like, so I just walked away, fast. But it was those kinds of things that Gavin was always saying, he would endlessly ask people "Want to hear about my hernia operation?" and when nobody replied he would just go on to the next topic. We all began to avoid Gavin, because he was, well, odd. There wasn't really any other word to describe it. The only time anyone willingly spent any time with him, it was all in jest, and it was all trivial mind games we played with him. Gavin was so gullible; he would fall for our pranks every time.

_'It's not like we hate him or want him to die,'_

Slowly, Gavin just stopped talking altogether. I guess he knew that nobody really cared about what he had to say, and so when we stopped listening, he stopped talking, telling random facts and statistics and generally pestering us all. Sometimes he wouldn't show up to class and when he was there he was non-responsive and borderline comatose. I don't think any of us actually heard Gavin speak intelligibly for about three months. It was really strange not hearing him spouting out useless nonsense or stuff that he read in all his books. One lunch period I went to the library to finish some English Lit. homework that was due the next class and I was expecting to see Gavin poring over some ancient piece of writing, but when I stepped into the room he wasn't in eyesight. I looked around the corner to see if he was there, but he wasn't. I asked Miss Nichol if he had been in earlier and she said he had, but that he hadn't checked out any books. I thanked her and walked along the grey tile floor to an empty desk to work on my assignment. But then Jon came by and we started fooling around and homework was quickly forgotten.

_'But maybe he goes home and thinks suicide,'_

Then one day in autumn, on October the twelfth, everything was as normal in school and everything was fine. I went to the library to pick up a book I needed for my French class and I saw Gavin checking a book out. I said hi to him and he started to talk to me. "Do you know how many leaves fall in autumn on an average scale?" he asked me. "No," I replied, "I don't." "Neither do I. I need to find out." Said Gavin, and he glazedly walked out of the library. I made it a point to myself to sit near Gavin at lunch and ask him if the book gave him the answer he was looking for. Since he was finally talking, I just wanted to make sure we wouldn't totally lose him again, even though the silence was refreshing. When the bell for lunch rang I walked to the cafeteria quickly, so that I could sit down by Gavin's table before my friends could convince me otherwise. I waited for five minutes and no one came into the cafeteria. I waited ten minutes and the lunch ladies poked their netted heads out of the kitchen to see the hordes of students they thought would come out. But no one came. Finally, after waiting fifteen minutes Gavin walked into the cafeteria and he began to speak to me in a cold, even tone, "Jenny, I always liked you. You were kind to me." "But I hardly spoke to you," I said. "Don't interrupt me. I always liked you, because you were never rude to me, and you never teased me, at least not to my face. You were quiet and pretty. Once I thought that maybe you could be my girlfriend, but when you started dating Jon I knew that you would never go out with someone like me. I died inside, Jenny. You were the only one who ever treated me like a human, Jenny, and then you ignored me like everyone else. Jon hated me. His friends hated me, Kyle and David and Eric all hated me. Marie hated me. Luc hated me. I killed them all. One by one I killed them all." I was dumbstruck, and I saw that Gavin was pulling a revolver out of his coat pocket, "I killed them all, because they killed me inside. Jenny, you never really cared at all. You never stopped me." And then he pressed the nib of the gun against his temple and destroyed himself. And all I could do was watch.

_'Or he comes back to school with a gun at his side,_

_And a kindness from you might have saved his life,_

_Heroes are made when you make a choice.'_  


End file.
